Perl Culture

Perl Golf - competitions to
find out the shortest Perl programs to achieve a certain task. Looking at
the winning entries and analysing them can actually teach you a lot about
built-in Perl features (some of them relatively obscure).

Prominent Perl People

Larry Wall - the father of Perl. A
very colourful, amusing and interesting person, who is also a competent UNIX
hacker (invented
patch,
rn and other utilities), and a linguist by training. Also see
the Wikipedia page about
him.

Tom Christiansen -
Authored several books and has been hacking with Perl and on Perl since its
early beginning. Wrote several FAQs and essays on Perl.

Mark Jason Dominus - Runs a web-site
that contains a lot of random information and code about Perl. Authored
the book "Higher Order Perl".

Damian Conway - a computer
science academic, with a passion for Perl. Wrote some books and many
CPAN modules (including
one
to write Perl in Latin - ;-)), and is considered
one of the primary experts on Object-Oriented Programming in Perl. Now
co-heads the Perl 6 effort.

Randal L. Schwartz -
co-authored some of Perl's most important books and one of the top experts
on Perl on the planet.

Jarkko Hietaniemi - the
CPAN master librarian, a contributor to
the core Perl distribution and external modules, and an all-around nice guy.